In this April I took part in a competition hold by Findwise and Mriday which is about search technology.
Search and Sort | Findwise
Current, Search and Sort | Findwise April 25th, 2009
We are constantly acquiring innovative ideas and solutions in the field of search technology. Therefore we have created the following contest to discover people who are interested in joining Findwise and build next generation’s search technology.
Project overview
The name of this contest is called Search and Sort. We can start by looking at an example which everybody is familiar with, Google. The Google search engine is the most used search engine on the Web. The search results generated from it includes webpages, PDF, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, Flash, videos etc. For any query, up to the first 1000 results can be shown with a maximum of 100 displayed per page.
Despite all this power, it is still sometimes time consuming to find the exact piece of information you are looking for. This is because although the different results are ranked, they are not well organized. For the average user, wouldn’t it be neat if different types of search results are categorized and displayed in different
groups?Submission
Your submission for this contest should contain two parts
Think of a search engine based on the concept of Search and Sort. Come up with a user interface design including two pages. One welcome page with the search box (and whatever else you think is suitable), and one page with the different types of results categorized, sorted, and presented in a userfriendly fashion. There is no strict requirements on exactly how the results will be categorized. It is entirely up to you to decide the types of categories. In fact, this will be a key deciding factor when your contest submission is being reviewed.
The second part of the contest is to discuss the framework behind your graphical user interface. What programming language and platform do you suggest for building the system? How would you extract information from different types of results and use that information to categorize them? Describe the plan to develop and implement it. The key for this part is to show a good understanding of the basics of a search engine, and a passion to innovate new ideas.
Searching has become the standard way for Internet users to find information. This contest gives you the chance to take Searching to the next level. If you are interested in search technology and would like to join the leading vendor independent company within this segment in Sweden, then send us your ideas. We will carefully review your submission and provide feedback. Your submission should be in PDF or DOC format.
The deadline for submission is 2009-04-30
Reward
The top 5 submissions will be invited to Findwise and receive a learning session about the company and the future of search technology. The most outstanding submission will receive a monetary reward of 10 000 SEK. Job offers will be presented to qualified individuals if requirements are met.
I spent a whole Sunday to write down a proposal for this topic. That’s the first time for me to write down something on “search technology” which is a very interesting and hot area nowdays. Even though this paper looks a lit bit naive now, I still like it since I enjoy the feeling of writing down something interesting very much.
You can find and download my proposal from the link below: